David Rees's Biography

Art was always a hobby of David Rees’s as he grew up. As a child he spent a lot of time drawing but always shied away from painting. It wasn’t until the end of his time at school that he began experimenting with oil paint and really enjoyed it as a medium for pushing his work further. His A-level pieces started attracting the attention of school parents wanting to buy them. He went on to study History of Art at University, but stopped producing art himself.

When he moved to London, he realised that he had lost something very important to him. He started painting again and saw it had the potential to be more than a hobby. After a fortuitous visit to a gallery and meeting a current up and coming artist he made the decision to quit his job and concentrate on making his first real body of work.

Ideas & Inspirations.

Rees says “Inspiration is hard to pin point, over time you become the collective of all your experiences and it is impossible to discount anything from influencing your work.” He is very interested in the technique of painting, and it fascinates him to try and see how a work is constructed by individual brush strokes and so he always tries to see artists who are painting and to study their work.

Rees loves the Italian renaissance, and feels that there is currently a real resurgence for oil painting, a lot of it being figurative. He appreciate many different types of art but really it is painting where my heart lies, saying “There is something very freeing to be able to enjoy a painting just for the technique that has gone into it, I feel it gives the view a real ownership of the work which for me is important.”

Ultimately, inspiration for Rees comes from getting out and seeing what artists are producing. He enjoys browsing works and artists on social media, saying “It can be like falling down the rabbit hole as you each artist leads you to another.”

From Palette to Picture.

Rees tries to be fairly organic with his painting, and doesn’t set out with a clear structure of what he wants to achieve. He finds that this gives him free reign to be brave with how he paints, and the more conservative he is, the worse the final product is. He believes that pushing what he is prepared to do has so far only progressed his work.

Rees believes it is very important when painting to not be afraid to make mistakes. He tends to paint sporadically, having periods of great progress before needing to take hours to look at it and understand what he need to do next and where the painting needs to go.